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Jeff Sessions (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)

Last week, the right-wing blogosphere gleefully erupted in response to Senator Jeff Sessions’ (R-Ala.) disclosure of a new Government Accounting Office report that, according to the Senator, reveals that the Affordable Care Act will increase our national debt by a stunning $6.2 trillion.

Speaking at a Budget Committee meeting, Sessions announced—

"According to GAO, under a realistic set of assumptions, the health care law will increase the deficit by...roughly $6.2 trillion over the next 75 years."

Take note of the Senator’s statement that the finding is based on ‘a realistic set of assumptions’ as this is, as you will see, at the very heart of Senator Sessions’ extraordinary deception—one designed to purposefully and cynically mislead the American public.

Sessions would go on to suggest that the GAO report was proof positive that—

“The big-government crowd in Washington manipulated the numbers in order to get the financial score they wanted, in order to get their bill passed and to increase power and influence. The goal was not truth or financial responsibility, but to pass the bill. This is how a country goes broke. It’s also how the economy and jobs are destroyed.”

It was the ultimate 'I told you so'—a startling disclosure that promised to inflame the passions of the anti-Obamacare forces in all parts of the nation.

In fact, so intense and immediate was the response from the Right that nobody seemed to notice that Senator Sessions chose to drop his Obamacare bomb a few hours before the GAO report was released to the public.

Conservative scribes—and the publications that print their work—pounced on the revelation, each more anxious than the next to spread the word that the Democrats and their President had been exposed in a great lie. It was an unfortunate reaction as, had they considered the benefits of withholding judgment until actually reading the report, they might have been saved from the egg covering they are not so proudly displaying on their faces today.

Indeed, so entranced were the anti-Obamacare forces with the message carried by the Alabama senator, they appeared to completely miss the statement in response to Senator Sessions’ pronouncement that was issued by GAO spokesman, Charles Young—a statement that directly and purposefully contradicted what Senator Sessions had sought to sell the public.

“We did not (emphasis added) make such an estimate. There are a number of different reasonable methods one could use that would result in a variety of different estimates. This is one such calculation."

Of course, Congressional Republicans are rarely inclined to allow the facts to get in the way of a good narrative—particularly one as juicy as a claim that Obamacare would run up the debt by $6.2 trillion.

Senator Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, had reason to be comfortable in seeking to make some big-time news before the GAO report had been made available. In fact, the Senator knew very well what was in the report prior to its release because it was Senator Sessions who ordered his staff to commission the study, carefully crafting the result he wanted to see. It is, therefore, no wonder that he raced to get his story out before anyone actually read the entire study. By doing so, he successfully controlled the press coverage to meet his misdirecting narrative rather than providing the public with a true accounting of what the study actually had to say.

Clever to be sure...but despicable and cowardly when considering that Sessions had good reason to know that reporting the complete scope of the report would ruin his partisan message.